Keyword research is like getting into the minds of your prospects. If you use an analytic tool to find out exactly what people are searching for in your niche, you can use those keywords to create content that answers all of their questions and relates to their interests. By satisfying the needs of your website visitors with informative content, you improve your credibility and thus boost your online business. Here are the 5 most important factors you should consider when conducting keyword research.

1. Find a Good Research Tool

There are numerous free keyword research tools out there and many people will argue that the free tools are all you need. Some examples of free tools include Google’s Adwords tool and the free search term suggestion tool by Keyword Discovery. However, these tools are limited in nature. If you’re willing to shell out around $40 per month, you can get your hands on a keyword tool that provides you with more information such as how many competing sites are targeting certain keywords in your niche.

2. Set Realistic Goals

If you are in a competitive niche, don’t aim for the keywords that have both high search volume and high competition. Those keywords will be incredibly difficult to rank for in the beginning. Instead, focus on ranking for keywords with lower search volume and less competition. When combined, these so-called long tail keywords can bring you decent traffic. The best keywords however are the keywords that have high traffic and little competition but they are obviously harder to find. Don’t ignore misspelled keywords either. There are some popular keywords that people commonly misspell when conducting searches. Incorporate those misspelled keywords into your content to give your site an edge over the competition.

3. Be Specific

If you are an accountant in Tucson, Arizona, don’t aim to rank for the keyword, “accountant.” Get specific so people who need exactly what you offer can find you with ease. For example, if you are an accountant who provides litigation support in Tucson, make sure the keyword phrases you use include those terms so you reach your target market.

4. Test Your Keywords with a PPC Campaign

Once you do your initial keyword research, create a landing page with those keywords and set up a PPC campaign. Use an analytic tool to find out how many people land on your page and with what search terms. You can also determine how much time they spent on your landing page and if you achieved any conversions. Using a PPC campaign prior to launching your complete SEO campaign will help you narrow down your keyword list to only the most effective ones.

5. Use LSI Keywords

Instead of just targeting the obvious keywords in your niche, it’s important to find keyword phrases that are associated with your topic. LSI stands for “latent semantic indexing.” It might sound like confusing jargon but it’s quite simple. All you have to do is use an LSI keyword tool, which will help you generate relevant keywords. Sprinkling LSI keywords in your content allows you to enhance your opportunities to receive search engine traffic. Search engines value websites that provide informational content and the more related keywords your content focuses on, the more value and depth it is perceived to have.

Utilize these keyword research strategies and you’ll be well on your way to increasing traffic to your site. When you’re starting out, it’s a good idea to target long tail keywords and very specific keywords. This will help you establish your website in the beginning. From there you can move on to the more competitive keywords in your niche to ultimately build a SEO online presence.

Labels: on_site_seo, seo_guide, seo_services

Increasing your Twitter following allows you to drive traffic to your website(s), build your online presence, and network with people from around the world. So how do you get more Twitter followers? Some may argue that it requires posting good tweets at a particular frequency or following good tweet etiquette while others say that it all boils down to driving traffic to your Twitter page and following people so they in turn follow you. Let’s explore those two arguments.

What We Can Gather From the Most Popular Twitter Users

If you go to twitterholic.com, you can see the users with the most number of Twitter followers. If you have a quick glance over the list, you’ll see that most of these users are already famous in real life, whether because they have a successful business or because they are a celebrity. It’s not like they built their Twitter profiles from the ground up and accumulated so many Twitter followers because they write good tweets. However, this doesn’t mean that you’re doomed not to gain a good following just because you’re not famous.

The Way You Use Twitter Has Little Importance

If you are worried that the frequency of your tweeting or the quality of your tweeting is what primarily affects the number of followers you get, quit obsessing. You must treat your Twitter account just as you would any one of your other websites. The key to success is driving traffic to your site. In the big picture, obsessing about your tweeting habits is really not going to make a difference. The idea is to maximize your visibility just as you would on your own blog. To come up with marketing strategies for getting more people to go to your Twitter page and follow you, think of some incentives for why those people would want to follow you.

Strategies for Increasing Your Twitter Following

Make your Twitter profile follow you wherever you go. Make sure you add a link to your Twitter page at the end of emails and forum signatures. Put links to your Twitter page on your other social media profiles. If you have an online business or application, consider using Twitter for tech/customer support. Try setting up a contest or giveaway on your Twitter page. You can also create a free tool and advertise it on your Twitter page. One of the exceptions to the rule of not worrying about tweeting etiquette is using tweets to link to articles of interest to your followers. This helps you build a following.

One of the most effective strategies for increasing your Twitter following is following other Twitter users. When you follow new users, those users usually follow you right back. The downside to this tactic is that if you start following many people in a short time on Twitter, you risk being labeled a spammer. So if you are looking to build a long-term strategy and a legitimate Twitter profile, you’ll probably want to follow people gradually. One way you can do it is start following a bunch of people to get them to follow you in return, and then cut down the number of people you follow to make your profile look legitimate. The problem with following too many people is that you are overloaded with tweets and it can be difficult to actually keep up with anyone.

In conclusion, there are two ways to approach Twitter when building your following. You can use it to get immediate traffic to your websites or you can use it to network and converse with your followers to build rapport. How you decide to build your following and use Twitter depends on the end goal you’d like to achieve. If you follow these simple methods though, you’re bound to increase your followers, no matter what your motive may be.

Labels: social_media

No one said making money online was easy but it’s not completely impossible either. Despite the fact that online competition is fierce these days, following some fundamental strategies will allow you to make money no matter what. Every website has pages that receive more traffic than others. By monetizing those high-traffic pages and optimizing them for the search engines, you’re bound to increase revenue for your site. Here are 5 surefire steps to take in order to make money with your website.

1. Find the Pages on Your Site with the Most Money-Making Potential

If you’re not already using an analytic tool, get one. Find out which pages on your site have the highest number of unique page views. You can focus on optimizing the top ten pages that receive the most traffic or even more pages if you have quite a few high-traffic pages. It might be tempting to try and optimize every single page on your site but the reality is that not every page has money-making potential. Focus on the pages that get a lot of good traffic, at the very least around a couple hundred views per day.

2. Make Sure Visitors Get What They’re Looking for When They Visit those Pages

Use your analytic tool to find out what visitors are searching for to get to your page. Then use the content on the page to address those search queries. Try answering every single search query you come across to make your page extra-useful to visitors. The more useful and relevant the content on your page is, the more likely the visitors are to link to your site, become return visitors, and spend a longer time browsing.

3. Monetize your High-Traffic Pages

First you have to decide what your ultimate goal is when visitors arrive to your page and then focus on that goal. If your goal is for people to subscribe to your blog or newsletter, make sure to make that the focal point of your page. You don’t want to confuse them with ads because they may end up not signing up as you had intended them to. If your goal is for visitors to click on ads, spend some time blending your ads in well with the page. It’s a good idea to make them stand out to visitors but without being too in-your-face. You can use an ad network like Adsense to monetize or an affiliate program like Clickbank.

4. Do Plenty of Internal Linking

Make sure to link to your high-traffic pages on your website when it’s relevant in order to further increase traffic to those areas. An effective strategy is to link to one high-traffic page on another high-traffic page because you can attempt to convert visitors into leads more than once that way if it doesn’t work the first time around. You can also create a reference page and link to all pages in your site that are relevant to certain popular topics. You can link to both high-traffic pages and pages that aren’t visited often on the reference page. You can also use banner ads or images to link to your high-traffic pages throughout your site in order to attract more attention to them.

5. Optimize Your Website for SEO

Use a keyword tool to find out what the target keywords are in your niche. Combine that knowledge with what your analytic tool tells you people are searching for in order to get to your site. Make sure your content is rich with those keywords but without being obnoxious. You need to utilize both on-page and off-page SEO tactics. Make sure you have good description meta tags that entice search engine users to click through and title tags that contain your target keywords. Off site you need to find ways to build strong links and the easiest way to do that if you are a blogger is to get links from other bloggers.

Make no mistake about it. By following these fundamental strategies, you’ll make money from your website. The results may not be had overnight but with the right amount of persistence, you’re sure to increase revenue and build a long-term avenue for making money online.

Labels: website_development

It’s essential for new websites to increase search engine visibility. One of the easiest ways for new websites to increase search engine visibility is through optimizing their content with long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are easier to rank for because they have low to medium competition and decent search traffic. However, no matter how keyword-rich your content is, nobody will find it unless your site’s ranking improves through the accumulation of backlinks. The most important factor in increasing visibility on the search engines over time is link building. Building links is free albeit time-consuming.

Getting Free Backlinks

There are a number of ways you can obtain free backlinks. One way to do this is through submitting your site to directories. Manually submitting your site to all the directories out there can be a long and arduous process but it will allow you to build up to hundreds of backlinks. You can also submit a press release announcing your new site to free press release distribution services online. The creation of Squidoo lenses also allows you to insert hyperlinks to different pages of your website with anchor text containing your target keywords. Hubpages also allows you to do something similar.

Also consider creating profiles on social media websites and putting your link in the profiles. If you ever decide to do a social media campaign to promote your site, it could be useful to already have a branded presence on social media portals. Links on social bookmarking sites can also help your site get crawled by search engines.

Writing for free can in turn bring you lots of backlinks and traffic. If you are a blogger, write guest posts for popular blogs that link back to your blog. You can also write short articles on your niche topic and submit them to article directories like ezinearticles. Ezinearticles gives authors a small resource box where you can include two hyperlinks to your website with anchor text that contains target keywords.

Another effective way to build links and network to build traffic is to participate in forum discussions and put your link in your forum signatures. You can also get involved in blog commenting to build networking relationships with bloggers, add to the discussions going on, and link to your site. Holding contests and giveaways is another way to build links for your site and build traffic. You can also increase traffic to your site and build links by offering a free tool or widget for use on a popular social media site such as Twitter and then credit the tool back to your site with a link. You can pay a designer to come up with the tool for you if you can’t do it yourself.

Additionally, find people to trade reciprocal links with. Do this by browsing webmaster forums to find link partners. It’s important not to overdo reciprocal linking because an excessive amount of reciprocal links can make your site lose value. However, gradual and moderate reciprocal linking can be beneficial. Make sure to trade links with sites that are highly relevant to yours so you can also increase traffic to your site while you’re at it.

Any new website owner that follows these simple and free link-building strategies will indeed manage to drive traffic to his/her website and accumulate links quickly. Building links can be a time-consuming process but the results are worth the effort because it is the #1 way to effectively improve search engine visibility.

Labels: link_building, seo_guide, seo_tips

Commenting on blogs is often cited as being important for any website’s link-building efforts. However, the benefits of blog commenting vary depending on how you approach the process. Most people who are doing it solely to build links and drive traffic to their site leave quick, relatively thoughtless comments on blogs that do not have no-follow turned off. While this may bring your blog instant traffic and links, the long-term benefits of leaving thoughtful comments and building relationships with bloggers is far more valuable.

Blog Commenting for Relationship-Building

When you comment on a blog not just to drop links but to actually interact with the blogger and his/her readers, you build an ongoing relationship that will give you far more benefits in the long run. When you comment on blogs to actually start a valuable conversation, the blogger will be more inclined to take you seriously. Self-serving blog comments may give you visibility, traffic, and links but what about building relationships with other people online that will bring you long-term benefits? If a popular blogger endorses one of your sites or services in the future, it could provide you with far more value than a self-serving link.

The Way Most Marketers Approach Blog Commenting

Most blog commentators that are trying to build links will scan the article in question and leave a comment that is vaguely relevant to the topic at hand. Bloggers love comments and typically read every single one when moderating them. Bloggers will probably remember your company name and the content of your blog comments so in essence, leaving blog comments is an aspect of brand-building. Your blog comment will be seen by hundreds if not thousands of people over the life of the blog and if you are leaving comments that are borderline spam, what does that say about you and your brand image?

The best way to approach blog commenting is by treating it as if it were a part of your marketing campaign. Don’t just leave comments on blogs for the sake of link-building. You can reap far more benefit with thoughtful blog comments because you will be able to network with others and form valuable relationships that will assist you in expanding your business. Furthermore, your blog comments are like advertising for your company and spammy blog comments are only going to hurt your company’s image in the eyes of the hundreds of blog readers who come across them.

It’s obvious to bloggers when you leave generic comments that are there for the sake of driving traffic to your site or building links. Bloggers respect commentators who are actually trying to develop a personal connection and rapport with them. Consider altering your mindset about blog commenting because the benefits of putting more thought into your comments and connecting with bloggers will pay off in the future.

In conclusion, blog commenting should be considered a networking tactic rather than a link-building tactic. The long-term benefits of forging mutually valuable relationships with bloggers are far more promising than the immediate benefits link dropping may offer you. Link dropping may bring you some traffic but the people who read your thoughtless blog comments aren’t going to hold you in very high regard. Building a powerful reputation is an essential component of your success online.

Labels: blogging, link_building, social_media

Tweeting, as it is called, is all the rage amongst online businesses these days. Twitter consists of writing short text messages of less than 140 characters that can be viewed by all of your followers. Twitter is a great way to attract attention to your online business thus serves as a form of free online marketing. Companies can use Twitter to interact with both current and potential customers, building brand loyalty and image. Here are 10 ways in which Twitter can boost your online business.

1. Twitter generates traffic to your site because you can send messages that include links. The only problem with trying to increase clientele with Twitter is that it is difficult to target a certain group or demographic. There is a possibility to create viral content on Twitter however because you can ask your friends to include your links in their tweets.

2. Twitter greatly enhances your personal brand. By using Twitter, you and your company develop a casual, approachable personality that is in the loop. This helps you attract new potential customers. The better you get at tweeting, the more likely you are to expand your potential customer base because new Tweeters are attracted to well-established Twitter users.

3. If you need to hire a writer, graphic designer or anyone else for that matter, you can do so easily on Twitter by sending a tweet out to your friends to ask if they know of anyone. This eliminates the need of putting out classified ads and weeding through prospective employees.

4. If you work remotely with other people, you can use Twitter as a way to interact as a group. Twitter options include making messages visible only to certain people, which would obviously be useful if you want to use it as a tool to communicate with people in your business.

5. It is easy to find new, potential customers by using Twitter’s search function. Search Twitter for your target keywords and you will find related tweets. Follow the Twitter users that are talking about relevant topics and you may be able to offer your product or services to them in the future.

6. Twitter can assist you in your social media efforts because anytime you submit an article to Digg or Stumble Upon for example you can include a link to your story and perhaps get others to vote for it.

7. Twitter allows you to stay in touch with your current customers. If you begin offering a new product or service, you can use Twitter to make an announcement.

8. With Twitter, you can connect with other people in your niche. This is helpful for building business relationships that will enhance your future networking efforts.

9. It’s easy to get feedback on any of your current projects with Twitter. If your site has a new design or you just put up a new article, you can tweet about it and ask your followers for feedback. This valuable feedback can help you improve your business and even come up with some new ideas for future projects.

10. With a Twitter widget on your website, you can link up with potential customers who find your site through a search engine. This allows you to connect with people on a more personal level and increase your followers.

Twitter can be very beneficial for your online business if you know how to use it to your advantage. It’s a free and easy way to network with both current customers and potential customers. Using Twitter allows you to connect with people on a personal level and is a powerful way to improve your online marketing and networking efforts.

Labels: link_building, seo_guide, social_media

While many of your blog or site visitors may leave comments or send you emails that tell you more about them and what they are interested in, many will have a look around your site and click onward without leaving a trace of information about who they are and what they care about.

Traffic analysis allows you to get an idea of who your website visitors are so it is essential if you want to improve your online marketing efforts. When marketing either online or offline, it’s important to know who your target audience is. You can become a more effective online marketer by determining who your website visitors are and what makes them tick.

Just like in the offline world, online marketers must first determine what the desired end result is and then analyze the target audience so they can use the right buzz words, images, and angle to appeal to this audience and get them to complete the desired action. Even if your customer base and target audience are constantly shifting, it’s essential to get a rough idea of who they are in order to effectively market your products and services.

Here are 4 important components of analyzing your site traffic.

1. If you are already using a site traffic analysis tool like Google Analytics, there is already a breadth of information available to you about your site visitors. One important factor you should analyze is visitor location. By finding out where your visitors are typically located, you can create landing pages to target people in specific geographic areas.

2. Visitor loyalty, bounce rate, and time spent on site are valuable ways to measure how interesting and engaging the content on your website is for visitors. By knowing how much time people spend on your site and how often they visit, you can figure out how enthusiastic people are about your content and know what’s working and what isn’t.

3. Keywords and search terms that visitors are searching for on your website and on search engines that lead them to your website are important to take note of. Keywords and search terms reveal what your site visitors are looking for and what gaps you may be able to fill in the future. When you consistently find a particular keyword being searched for on your site, it’s practically guaranteed that the keyword topic would be successful if you used it to create new content on your site.

4. Take a look at all of the traffic sources that lead visitors to your website. This includes referral sites, bookmarks, ads, and search engines. This information will help you because then you can figure out what sources are bringing you the most traffic and what type of content people are reading that leads them to your site. Data about traffic sources also tells you where you could increase visibility for your site.

Analyze your site traffic with these factors in mind. Don’t just look at your statistics every once in a while but study them regularly so you can start to see the bigger picture. By applying what you learn from your traffic, you can vastly improve your online presence and offerings for visitors.

Labels: seo_guide, seo_services

Stumble Upon is a social media website that allows you to tag your personal and professional interests so you can filter the web for sites based on your particular interests when you surf for content. Rather than searching for specific terms like you would on Google, on Stumble Upon you can surf through sites that are more broadly related to your areas of interest. You can then tag the websites you find with a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.”

Stumble Upon also works like a social bookmarking site because you can tag the websites you like and share them with other users. To get started with Stumble Upon, add your own website along with a short description and keyword tags so it can be “stumbled” when other users find it.

Stumble Upon provides a powerful way for you to drive massive amounts of traffic to your website. You can get your website viewed by people all over the world if it gets “stumbled.” Stumble Upon can dramatically improve your online presence because it builds backlinks created by users, helps you to establish a reader base for your content, and gives your site exposure very quickly. Here are 10 tips that will help you bring a substantial amount of traffic to your site.

1. Websites that tend to get the most traffic from Stumble Upon are Web 2.0 websites, video websites, and humor websites. Try to include humor and videos into your website content if you want to have a greater chance of success in driving traffic and retaining readers from Stumble Upon.

2. Good site design will make you or break you. Visitors tend to only stay for a short time and look around so if your site design is less than attractive, you won’t see many return visitors or visitors who stay for very long. Visual appeal is essential.

3. Make sure it’s obvious and easy for site visitors to subscribe to your blog via RSS feed or sign up for your newsletter. This will allow you to get new readers who in turn become potential customers and repeat visitors.

4. Brand image is essential to your success on Stumble Upon. If you want people to continually return to your site and have it be imprinted in their minds, you need to make sure your URL is easy to remember and that your brand image is crisp and memorable.

5. Offer tools and materials on your site that cannot be accessed elsewhere to attract return visits.

6. Make sure that your website provides plenty of compelling content. The more the better because then visitors have a reason to return and read the materials that they could not finish the first time around.

7. If you have a blog, make sure people can subscribe via email because not everyone reads blogs through a reader. That way you can cater to different types of site visitors.

8. After one of your articles or blog posts has been stumbled, make sure to have plenty of great content ready to provide to your site visitors because they are going to have high expectations. You will probably have the most success if you use articles that are similar to the one that got a lot of stumbles.

9. Everyone loves to win free stuff so make sure to hold a contest or giveaway after a spike in traffic. This will help you attract regular readers.

10. You are only allowed five tags on your articles in Stumble Upon so try to make them as general as possible. This will in turn mean you get more eyeballs on your content.

Keep these tips in mind when using Stumble Upon to increase traffic to your site. Stumble Upon is used by a broad demographic of people and is a very effective way to get your content seen and read. By following these tips, you will be able to attract visitors to your site who will in turn become regulars.

Labels: link_building, social_media

One of the most important factors in search engine optimization is back links. In the last years no website has ranked for any keyword just by buying a search engines submission service. Since 2004, if not earlier, all the important spiders have learned to auto discovery web sites by following links from other domains.

When Altavista.com and Inktomi were still important players in the search engines market, spending hours submitting all URLs in a website every couple of weeks, together with well optimized meta tags and an high keyword density would easily rank almost any keyword. Search engine optimization is currently a totally different game.

Today almost every search engine shows results from Google, Yahoo or MSN. Having a high keyword density, optimized meta tags and submitting a website to the search engines isn't going to take a domain anywhere near the top ten positions without incoming links. Most of the techniques used in 2007 are already obsolete, if not prohibited, and search engine submissions is now as worthless as it has been for half a decade. It has been several years since the submission pages were a click away from the index of search engines, exactly the same time it has been a useless technique.

Having your website crawled and indexed is probably the last preoccupation of every SEO. Once a website is properly optimized and the link building campaign starts, search engine spiders will include your complete website in their index automatically in no time. You should not worry about the submission part itself, optimizing and ranking a website is a much more complex job that largely depends on content and incoming links. Worry about achieving the highest amount of quality back links, create quality content for your users and you'll accomplish much better results than just paying a submission service.

If you still have the need of submitting your site, all major search engines apart from automatically discovering your website now offer a much more evolved form of submission. Google, Yahoo and MSN are all offering free webmaster accounts where you can add your complete sitemap in different formats. Your URL won't magically start ranking after you submit your sitemap but at least you'll have a real updated control of your submission.

It is important to differentiate between search engine submission services and search engine inclusion services. Once a website is submitted the service you have ordered is completed and actual indexing in the important search engines is not guaranteed. If you are completely new to search engine optimization a search engines inclusion services might be a good option while you learn the basics of SEO. Search engine inclusion services, most of the time, are based on actual SEO techniques and guarantee your website will be "spidered" in a limited amount of time or your money will be refunded.

Even if SEO is not as easy as many people make it look, to understand the basic concepts is extremely important. Before you throw your money down the drain and expect impossible results we highly recommend a little research.

Labels: search_engines, seo_services

One of the best ways to drive massive traffic to your site in a short period of time is through the creation of viral content or linkbait. Linkbait is created with the sole purpose of driving more traffic to your website through links and bookmarks.

Content that is successful in this regard typically does not have any indication of being linkbait. You need to make sure that your content is very useful to readers and that it is not an obvious attempt at creating linkbait. The moment that a visitor comes to your site, they must be able to see the value that your content provides for them.

Keep it Simple

If you want to make a particular piece of content viral, keep it simple. The key is to attract a general audience. Many visitors write off articles that are overly complex. Keep it easy to swallow and understand to increase your chances of creating linkbait.

Encourage People to Share and Distribute the Content

If you have a killer piece of content, encourage people to submit it to social media sites. You can also go ahead and add buttons for social media sites to make it easier for them to submit it. For images and videos, you can provide an HTML code that will allow them to embed the item into their own sites. You can also provide an email form that allows users to email the content to their friends and family.

Keep with what’s New in Pop Culture

Make sure the content is timely and trendy for a greater chance of success at making it linkbait. Topical content is the most popular and works the best as linkbait. Try to stick with topics that are new and relevant to current pop culture so that more people are likely to find your content interesting and fresh.

Ask for the Visitor’s Email

It’s a good idea to offer an email opt-in newsletter or some other subscription service anytime you have viral content. This will help to get those new visitors to become regular visitors to your site because you can stay in touch with them long after the hype is gone. By getting new subscribers, you can make the most of all of the new traffic that is coming to your website.

Use Images

Images are very effective as linkbait because they cross language barriers and can be digested by everyone. Some people don’t like to read long articles and are attracted to content simply for its visual appeal.
Some things you can do to make the most out of the traffic you receive with viral content are to display the products or services you offer on a sidebar to make all visitors aware of them and to link to another one of your compelling pieces of content at the end so visitors are directed to yet another one of your articles, images or videos.

In conclusion, there are a number of factors that will determine how successful your content can be as linkbait. It’s important to try a hand at every one of these tactics until you figure out a formula that works for you in the creation of viral linkbait.

Labels: blogging, link_building, social_media

As a search engine optimization company we are constantly monitoring several markets to stay up to date on the latest algorithm trends. In the years we have always notice that somehow Google discriminates or just doesn't "force" all websites into following their own guidelines and what for many websites would be an instant ban is the success of others.

In SEO the goal is not always to be in the top positions, to be really successful it is extremely important to stay there. Many black hat techniques can achieve top rankings for almost any site the problem is the risk of getting de-indexed by googlebot and basically throwing all the hard work down the drain. The same thing happens with many not so shady techniques that in the previous years were part of any basic optimization strategy.

It would take a book to list and explain in details how every webmaster guideline is broken by certain industries so we will only try to prove our point in the shortest possible way hopefully without boring you.

If we look at the online gambling industry for example you'll easily notice using yahoo site explorer that the top ranking results have literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of incoming links. Being back links one of the most important factors in search engine optimization any SEO knows how complicated is to achieve them, specially from related sources without braking the "don't buy links" rule that Google imposed. In the case of the gambling industry it seems that this rule does not apply. Out of the first thousand links shown by the site explorer for any of the top ranking websites, at least eighty percent are clearly paid advertising spaces. Most of them are included in the websites navigation and do not look at all natural, clearly against Google's and Matt Cutts recommendations.

Since Pfizer invented the now famous blue pill the keyword "buy Viagra" has been the target of thousands pharmacy affiliate webmasters due to the huge amount of traffic and revenue, some webmasters in forums speculated that being in the top three results would generate as much as $10.000 in sales per day. This keyword is probably the best example of how Google's guidelines are not for everybody. It has been more than three years since we have been constantly checking this keyword, for this entire period the top ranking results are owned by spammers always using the same technique, apparently useless to other equally trafficked industries.

The adult industry has been one of the most competitive markets since the beginning of the internet, for this same reason it is one of the hardest industries to optimize. Sincerely we don't know what could be considered as high quality content for an adult site but eight out of ten results are completely based on images and videos both unreadable, a part from the alt tags, by the spiders. Most sites only provide at most one paragraph of text and many more than the recommended one hundred links per page.

As webmasters and SEOs we don't have anything against the people taking advantage of Google's flaws, we are sure that they are having a great time spending the cash earned by their strategies. The techniques they used to be in the top positions do take a lot of hard work and it is only fair for us to respect them. We just can't understand why the discrimination and how come certain industries, many more than the three listed above, apparently have different ranking rules than other niches.

Labels: google, search_engines